Quote collection
42 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Some writers are curiously unmusical. I don't get it. I don't get them. For me, music is essential. I always have music on when I'm doing well. Writing and music are two different mediums, but musical phrases can give you sentences that you didn't think you ever had."
"I found out about reviews early on. They're mostly written by sad men on bad afternoons. That's probably why I'm less angry than some writers, who are so narcissistic they consider every line of every review, even a thoughtful one, as major treason."
"A writers job is to destroy and then to build the thing back up again by a chosen means."
"Love and despair go hand in hand."
"The first two drinks were always wonderfully liberating. You think better. You're braver, and you'll say anything. If you could just hang in there with two or three, it'd be beautiful. The trouble was I couldn't."
"My stories do have plot. They're not just scattered language; they're controlled, toward an end."
"You've got to lie to stay halfway interested in yourself."
"Children will listen to anything elders say to survive, and if you grew up without an elder telling you there was a god, what did your parents say to you?"
"I grew up when people seemed actually to be hurting themselves for their art. Of course, some of it was phony."
"I lost my second marriage because of drinking, and I loved the woman very much. But I thought I needed booze to write. I'm glad I was disabused."
"I wake my wife up at 3 a.m. and say, "Listen to this!""
"I thought I was writing for a fairly hip, intelligent crowd; I just thought there were more of them out there. But they're not. They're not out there waiting. They're not gonna use their intelligence on your book."
"I always intended to be light and open. I misjudged the American audience."
"I never pulled a loaded pistol on anybody, but it got around that I did. It got turned into lore. It's a myth. There's so much bad gun stuff."
"I don't really believe in a creative-writing major as an undergraduate. It's a bad idea, terrible. I've met creative-writing majors from other places and they don't know a goddamn thing. They're the worst students. They just think they're good because they could pass."
"The alcohol had the code and mystery about it as a writer's drug, but I'm glad that's been debunked. But the trouble with the drinking, much as I hate to admit it, is it helped the work."
"The wild stuff is all so overrated. Drinking, you don't feel good all the time. There's a lot of down, a lot of misery."
"There was no one, when I was in school, who talked about going in and blowing up students. The teachers were very stern and hateable, but nobody ever mentioned murder."
"I wanted very much to be Miles Davis when I was a boy, but without the practice. It just looked like an endless road."
"Where is the angry machine of all of us? Why is God such a blurred magician? Why are you begging for your life if you believe those things? Prove to me that you’re better than the rabbits we ate last night."